Category: TRENDS ON THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC FRONT

The price of nickel reached $18,410 a ton last week on the London Metal Exchange, a 70-percent climb since March. The rise has been driven by forecasts of dramatic growth in electric vehicle sales to be fostered by public and policymakers’ interest in zero-emissions technologies, analysts say. EV batteries increasingly are using larger proportions of...

Since March, investors have funneled more than $360 billion into the economies of 63 developing nations, including nearly $180 in 2020’s fourth quarter and more than $17 billion during the first three weeks of this month, according to data from the Institute of International Finance reported by the Financial Times on 23 January. Investors yanked...

Germany has extended its broad economic lockdown through mid-February, which will cause the nation’s economy to “stagnate” in 2021’s first quarter, according to an analysis by the ifo Institute, a German thinktank. The economy can grow as much as 3 percent in the second quarter but only if the shutdown is lifted by 1 March...

About 181,000 Canadian businesses, or about one in every six, are seriously considering permanently closing, according to a mid-January survey by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). That many closures could erase about 2.4 million jobs or about 20 percent of Canada’s private-sector jobs, the CFIB said in a statement announcing the survey’s result....

Across Europe, office buildings are deserted, malls are empty, and Main Street shops are shuttered, but major landlords are not in crisis: the continent’s central banks are buying bonds backed by commercial real estate loans, the Financial Times reported last week. The share price of Unibail Rodamco Westfield – an investment trust owning exhibit halls,...

Although the dollar has risen one percent this month against an array of foreign currencies, speculators have taken more short positions by 12 January – bets that the dollar will continue falling in value, as it did through the last half of 2020 – than at any time since March 2018, the Financial Times reported...

In the first two weeks of this year, Asian governments and corporations issued $45 billion in dollar-denominated bonds, according to financial services company Dealogic.  The amount is three-quarters of the total of such debt Asia took on in all of January 2020. Governments claim they are using the new debt to cover costs of caring...

The European Central Bank (ECB) promised on 21 January to keep buying bonds and maintain interest rates at or below zero after bank president Christine Lagarde noted that the Eurozone’s economy shrank again in 2020’s final quarter and the outlook for the current quarter remains cloudy. After acknowledging that business investment and consumer spending remain...

Europe’s banks hold more than €2 trillion in loans – about 40 percent of their loan portfolios – to small businesses, which increasingly are at risk of failure as the COVID pandemic continues to ravage the continent and governments keep economies locked up. The banks have few resources to offset weak loans. They already struggle...

As we have forecast, the 20th century was the American century – the 21st century will be the Chinese century. The business of China is business; the business of America is war. While America spent countless trillions waging and losing endless wars and enriching its military-industrial complex, China has spent its trillions advancing the nation’s...